15 UGC Examples to Copy: Glossier, GoPro, ASOS & More.

Most lists of UGC examples read like a museum tour. You file past a Glossier shelfie, a GoPro reel, an Apple billboard, you admire the budget behind each one, and you close the tab no closer to making anything yourself.

You can't copy a budget. You can copy a move.

So this roundup is built for the second thing. Below are fifteen brands that got customers and creators to make their marketing, grouped by the goal you're chasing. For each one: the play underneath it, where it runs, why it works, and how to run a smaller version yourself, even with no budget and no following. A few of these brands spent millions. The move each is built on costs close to nothing.

First, the plain version of what we're talking about. A UGC example is a piece of content a customer or a creator made, not the brand, that the brand then put to work in its marketing: on a product page, in an ad, in an email, on a billboard. That's the whole idea. (New to the format side of this? Our guide to UGC content types maps every deliverable. Starting from zero? What UGC is and why it works covers the basics.)

What makes a UGC example worth copying

Before the list, the filter. The pieces that actually move sales tend to share four traits. Use them to judge any example below, and anything you commission yourself.

It looks like a person made it, not a brand. Natural light, a lived-in setting, an unscripted reaction. The second it feels staged, the trust that makes UGC work drains out of it.

The product is in the scene, not on a pedestal. It's clearly there, but it's part of someone's day, not floating on white. "Person using the thing" beats "thing photographed next to a person."

The setting tells a small story. A serum on a cluttered bathroom shelf. Running shoes by the door next to a leash and keys. Context lets a viewer picture the product in their own life.

Something makes you stop. Surprise, humor, a flash of recognition. The best UGC earns attention in the first couple of seconds.

This isn't only taste. In one survey of more than a thousand US consumers, 82% said they'd be more inclined to buy from a brand that used customer content in its marketing.¹ The examples below earn that trust because they nail at least three of the four traits. The ones that fall flat usually miss all four.

The 15 at a glance

Start here, then jump to the goal you're working on.

Make your product pages convert

The highest-value place to put UGC isn't social. It's the page where someone decides to buy. These two brands put customer content exactly there.

1. Maude: reviews that carry a sensitive category

Maude, an intimacy and wellness brand, leads its product pages with customer ratings and written reviews, often more than a thousand per product.²

In a sensitive category, the deciding question isn't whether the product is good, it's whether it's right, and discreet, for someone like the buyer. Only another customer's account answers that credibly, so Maude puts the reassurance first instead of burying it in a tab. Authentic content like this consistently outperforms polished studio shots at the point of decision.

Copy it: collect reviews and put them where the hesitation lives, not behind a tab. If your product solves something personal, let buyers speak to the worry your own copy can't credibly address.

2. Glossier: customers as the content team

Glossier built its name by treating customers as its content team. Instead of restaging everything in a studio, it reposts the photos and routines people already share, and designs its products and packaging to look good in an ordinary phone shot.³ Putting customers' own posts back in front of everyone tells each one that they could be the next face of the brand.

When you see someone with your skin type using a product, you picture yourself doing the same. (More on why that peer trust converts: the psychology behind authentic content.)

Copy it: ask buyers to share a photo, repost the best with credit, and make your packaging photogenic enough that an ordinary phone shot looks good. You don't need a studio to start a customer-content loop. For a creator, that lived-in "here's how I use it" style is one of the easiest formats to practice and pitch.

Fuel your ads with customer footage

Studio creative is slow and costs a lot, and you need plenty of it. These two brands let customers supply the raw material. If you want the formats that tend to carry ads, here are the UGC video examples that convert and the brief that gets each one.

3. GoPro: the customer footage is the library

GoPro's flagship Million Dollar Challenge reel is built entirely from customer clips. Its 2023 edition was, in GoPro's own words, "100% user-generated," and the brand has said the submissions fuel a year's worth of content.⁴

GoPro has a built-in advantage, the product is the camera, so every clip is both entertainment and a demo. The prize keeps a pipeline of fresh footage flowing without a production team.

Copy it: you're probably not a camera brand, so manufacture the incentive. A small recurring prompt ("share a clip using our product, the best one each month wins X") gives you a steady stream of footage to cut into ad creative, no shoot required.

4. Apple: customer photos that make the argument for you

Apple's "Shot on iPhone" has run photos taken by ordinary iPhone owners on billboards around the world since 2015, and the campaign won an Outdoor Grand Prix at Cannes Lions that first year.⁵

Nothing proves a camera like the photos its owners actually take. By making the customer base the proof, Apple turned a product claim into a wall of evidence it didn't have to shoot.

Copy it: skip the billboards. Use customer photos as your hero images and the first frame of your ads, and let the work make the quality argument. A strong customer shot beats a stock image almost every time.

Capture once, reuse it everywhere

The brands that win at UGC treat it as a supply chain, not a one-off. They capture content once and run it across channels.

5. ASOS: tagged photos turned into a shoppable gallery

ASOS asked customers to tag outfit photos with #AsSeenOnMe, curated the best, linked each photo to the product, and ran them as a shoppable gallery on its own site.⁶ (ASOS has since retired the gallery, but the play still works for anyone who wants it.)

The ask is dead simple, wear it, photograph it, tag it, and the reward is visibility, getting featured by a brand you like. The result was an ever-refreshing, shoppable content library that would have cost a fortune to produce through shoots.

Copy it: add a shoppable UGC gallery to your store and seed it by reposting customers who already tag you. Even a small, current gallery signals that people buy and love the product.

6. Aerie: a stance that grew into an engine

Aerie's #AerieREAL began in 2014 as a pledge to stop retouching its models.⁷ It grew into a weekly habit: the brand finds customers posting under the hashtag, briefs a few, and features their photos on its site and product pages. By the first quarter of 2023, Aerie reported revenue up 12% year over year, an all-time Q1 high for the brand.⁷

A clear point of view gives customers a reason to take part and be seen, and that participation kept compounding long after the launch.

Copy it: take one small, honest stance your customers actually believe in, then make it effortless for them to show themselves using your product under that banner. The stance is what turns a photo request into participation.

7. Pura Vida: customer photos that live in your email

Pura Vida, the jewelry brand, weaves customer photos through its email at every stage of the journey, and its co-founder has credited that content with adding trust to those sends.⁸

A customer photo dropped into an email is social proof placed exactly where the decision happens. The same asset works in a welcome flow, an abandoned-cart nudge, and a post-purchase note.

Copy it: put one customer photo into your email sequences, the cart and post-purchase sends especially, and ask for the next photo in the same message. The loop funds itself.

Spark a participation wave

Some brands don't collect content quietly. They invite a flood of it with one easy prompt.

8. Chipotle: one easy action, hundreds of thousands of videos

Chipotle's #GuacDance asked fans to do a single dance to a short jingle. It drew more than 250,000 video submissions and close to 430 million video starts in six days, and Chipotle called it the highest-performing branded challenge to run in the US at the time.⁹ Chipotle filmed none of them.

The action is low-effort and joinable, one move, one sound, and the format invites people to riff. Volume comes precisely because every video looks a little different, so the feed never tires of it.

Copy it: give customers one easy, repeatable thing to film, a gesture, a sound, a before-and-after, and make joining trivial. You don't need reach to start. You need a format simple enough that the first ten people can do it without thinking.

9. Starbucks: customers design the actual product

After backlash to a plain holiday cup, Starbucks asked customers to design the next one themselves. More than 1,200 designs came in from 13 countries, and the brand printed 13 of them on its 2016 holiday cups.¹⁰

The incentive is one money can't buy: your design on something thousands of people will hold. And everyone who enters rallies friends around their submission, doing the reach for you.

Copy it: invite customers to design or name something small and put the winner into production, a sticker, a label, a limited flavor, a colorway. People enter for the recognition, so it barely costs you anything.

10. Owala: a prompt that makes customers the storytellers

In 2025, the drinkware brand Owala ran "Owalafy It," inviting fans to nominate someone who could use an unexpected bit of joy.¹¹ The nominations became the content: small stories about why a friend, a nurse, a tired parent deserved a surprise.

Asking customers to nominate someone else turns a giveaway into a wave of heartfelt posts, and the brand rides along on the goodwill rather than asking people to praise a water bottle.

Copy it: build your prompt around your customer's people, not your product. "Tag someone who needs this" pulls more content, and warmer content, than "post about us" ever will.

Build a community that creates for you

A community that shares an identity makes content as a byproduct of belonging. These brands built the room and let customers fill it.

11. Chewy: prompt the feeling, not the product

Chewy's #PetsBringUsTogether invites owners to share everyday moments with their animals.¹² Not reviews, not unboxings, just pets being pets, with the brand gently attached to the bond.

Pet content gets shared on its own. Chewy attaches itself to a relationship people already want to post about, so the content arrives without a hard ask.

Copy it: ask for the feeling your product lives around, not a review of it. The content people most want to make is about their own lives, so hand them a reason that flatters them. (If you sell to pet owners, our pet UGC guide covers the brief shapes that work.)

12. Purina: a small, repeatable contest

Purina runs seasonal pet-photo contests, like its "Thanksgiving's Top Dog" tie-in with the National Dog Show, asking owners to post their pets with a hashtag for a chance to be featured.¹³

It's simple, repeatable, and scalable. The featured-entry reward keeps submissions coming without expensive prizes, and each entry is a small vote of brand affection.

Copy it: run a recurring contest with a clear seasonal theme and a low-cost reward, a feature, a small discount, a spot in your next email. Repetition builds the habit.

13. Gymshark: a community that makes its own content

Gymshark grew from a garage operation into a brand valued at over a billion pounds in 2020, with a community of more than twelve million followers that makes its own content.¹⁴ Its 66-day #Gymshark66 challenge invites people to set a goal and share their progress for 66 days straight.

When customers share an identity, they create around it without being asked. The brand's job is to give that identity a name and a reason to gather.

Copy it: give your best customers somewhere to belong, a challenge, a group, a label they'd wear, and content follows. A community keeps producing long after a campaign would have stopped, and once it exists, it costs almost nothing to sustain.

Get discovered and launch with creators

When you need a moment, awareness or a launch, the right creators and a product worth talking about do the heavy lifting.

14. Sol de Janeiro: let customers describe what you can't show

Sol de Janeiro's Cheirosa '62 mist became a phenomenon largely through unpaid TikTok videos of customers trying to describe how it smells, which is exactly the thing a brand can't show through a screen.¹⁵

Customers solved a problem the brand couldn't, putting a scent into words. And because the buzz was organic rather than paid, it read as credible in a way an ad never could.

Copy it: make something worth talking about, then hand customers the language to describe it (a memorable name, a vivid comparison). Seed it with a few well-matched creators in your niche and let word do the rest.

15. e.l.f.: hand one creator the keys

e.l.f. named creator Mikayla Nogueira its "CEO for a Day" and let her front the restock of a sold-out lip product, turning a routine relaunch into an event her audience already cared about.¹⁶

e.l.f. handed creative control to someone the audience already trusted, so the content felt like entertainment with the product riding along, not a launch announcement.

Copy it: you don't need a famous creator. Pick one your niche genuinely trusts, give them a role and genuine creative control over a single drop, and let their voice carry it. (For the full sequence, see our product launch playbook.)

What the best examples have in common

Fifteen brands, wildly different budgets, the same handful of moves underneath:

People, not productions. Every one features content made by actual customers or creators in their own spaces, not actors on a set and not AI-generated imagery. That's the foundation the rest sits on.

Platform-native execution. A TikTok challenge, an on-site gallery, a product-page review, and a billboard are different jobs. The brands getting results shape content for where it will live instead of reposting one asset everywhere.

Fit over follower count. The creators and customers here were picked for relevance, not reach. A well-matched micro creator usually beats a mega one for content that converts.

Systems, not stunts. GoPro's always-on challenge, Pura Vida's email loop, ASOS's gallery: these are machines that keep producing, not one-time campaigns.

Deployed everywhere, not just social. Product pages, paid ads, email, billboards, in-store. The best customer content goes wherever a purchase decision gets made.

Copy a play this week

You don't need e.l.f.'s reach or GoPro's built-in advantage. Pick the tier that fits where you are:

No budget: make your product pages do the work. Turn on visual reviews and prompt buyers to add a photo. It's the Maude and Glossier move, and it's the highest-converting placement for UGC whether you sell on Shopify, Amazon, or your own store.

Small budget: commission a batch and test. Brief a few creators, ask for several variations each, and keep the winners. It's the GoPro and Apple pattern of treating customer content as creative to test, not a single hero shot. A clear brief is the difference between usable footage and a reshoot.

Ongoing: build a loop. Add a post-purchase prompt or a hashtag, then reuse what comes in across email, ads, and your site, the way DTC brands build a content engine. One capture, many placements. And if you want more plays at this size, here are campaign ideas sized for a small brand, staged by what you already have.

The thread through all fifteen: UGC isn't a campaign type, it's a way of producing content. The brands getting the best results aren't running one-off experiments. They've built systems that keep content flowing, and they put it everywhere it can shape a sale.

So pick one play and start this week. If you don't have customer content to work with yet, the fastest way to get some is to brief a creator who already makes content in your category, which is what a marketplace like Modliflex is for: you browse portfolios, send a brief, and get back photos and videos ready for product pages, ads, email, and social.

A few questions people ask

What is a UGC example? A piece of content a customer or creator made, an unboxing clip, a get-ready-with-me, a review photo, that a brand then uses in its own marketing. The Apple billboards and Glossier reposts above are big-budget versions; a single customer photo on a product page is the same idea at zero cost.

What makes a UGC example good? Four things: it looks like a person made it, the product is in the scene rather than on a pedestal, the setting tells a small story, and something in the first couple of seconds makes you stop. Miss all four and even a big campaign falls flat.

What's the easiest type of UGC to start with? Reviews with a photo, and short demos or unboxings. They need no budget, no following, and no studio, and they sit closest to the buying decision. Our guide to UGC content types breaks down every format and what each is good for.

Can a beginner make content like this? Yes. Pick a product you already own and shoot one example in the style of the ones above, a quick demo, an honest review, a tidy flat lay. That clip is your first portfolio piece, and you didn't need a brand to make it. Here's how to become a UGC creator from there.

Footnotes

1. EnTribe, The State of UGC 2023 consumer survey (more than 1,000 US respondents, 2023). EnTribe. ↩

2. Maude product page showing customer ratings and reviews (Vibe page observed June 2026, rated 4.8 with more than 1,400 reviews). Maude. ↩

3. Harvard's Digital Data Design Institute (Digital Initiative), analysis of Glossier's community-driven, customer-content model. Analysis. ↩

4. GoPro, GoPro's 5th Million Dollar Challenge Breaks Records (2023), describing its "100% user-generated" challenge reel; Modern Retail (2023) on how the program's submissions fuel a year of content. GoPro, Modern Retail. ↩

5. MacRumors (2015) on Apple's "Shot on iPhone" winning the Outdoor Grand Prix at Cannes Lions; the campaign has featured customer-taken photos on billboards worldwide since 2015. MacRumors. ↩

6. Drapers (trade press) on the ASOS #AsSeenOnMe launch: customers tag or upload outfit photos, Olapic curates them, staff link each to its product page, and customers buy from an on-site gallery. (ASOS has since retired the gallery.) Drapers. ↩

7. American Eagle / Aerie press release on the unretouched #AerieREAL launch (2014); Marketing Brew (2023) on the ongoing customer-content program and Aerie's reported 12% year-over-year revenue growth in Q1 2023, an all-time Q1 high. AEO release, Marketing Brew. ↩ ↩²

8. MyTotalRetail / IRCE, Pura Vida co-founder Griffin Thall on using customer UGC in email across the buying journey. Talk summary. ↩

9. Chipotle, Chipotle's National Avocado Day Celebrations Smash Records (2019): the #GuacDance challenge drew over 250,000 video submissions and nearly 430 million video starts in six days, which Chipotle called TikTok's highest-performing branded challenge to run in the US at the time. Chipotle newsroom. ↩

10. Starbucks Newsroom, "Meet the Customers Who Designed Starbucks Holiday Red Cups" (2016): "more than 1,200 individual submissions from 13 countries," with 13 designs chosen for the holiday cups. Starbucks Newsroom (archived). ↩

11. Owala, Owalafy It campaign (2025), inviting fans to nominate someone for an unexpected gift. Owala. ↩

12. Chewy, anniversary release describing the #PetsBringUsTogether campaign (2021). Chewy newsroom. ↩

13. Purina, Thanksgiving's Top Dog contest on the National Dog Show broadcast (2024), asking owners to post pet photos or videos with #ThanksgivingsTopDog. Purina newsroom. ↩

14. General Atlantic (2020) on Gymshark's community of more than twelve million followers and a valuation of over £1 billion; Gymshark on its 66-day #Gymshark66 challenge. General Atlantic, Gymshark. ↩

15. Highsnobiety (2023), How Sol de Janeiro Became TikTok's Favorite Fragrance Brand, on the brand's largely organic, creator-driven TikTok rise. Highsnobiety. ↩

16. Tubefilter (2024) on e.l.f.'s "CEO for a Day" restock with creator Mikayla Nogueira. Tubefilter. ↩